House OKs bill speeding up LNG export process

By Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Washington Bureau

January 28, 2015

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed legislation to accelerate natural gas exports, despite muted opposition from the Obama administration and even as the Senate rejected a more aggressive plan.

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The bill, passed 277-133, would force the Energy Department to decide whether to grant licenses to pending projects to broadly export liquefied natural gas within 30 days after they clear an environmental review. Under the Energy Department’s current practice, there is no deadline for those decisions. Officials wait until environmental reviews are done before taking up applications to export LNG to countries that aren’t U.S. free-trade partners.

For onshore LNG export projects, the environmental reviews typically happen as the ventures are under Federal Energy Regulatory Commission scrutiny. It can take months after those environmental analyses are done — and even after a FERC approval — for the Energy Department to deliver a verdict on a project’s export license.

Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, who sponsored the House-passed bill, said that’s too long. The answer, he said, is legislation “cutting through the bureaucratic red tape.”

“With dozens of projects seeking approval, Washington is making it difficult for businesses to make the investment decisions needed to take advantage of (abundant natural gas),” Johnson said. Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, also said the current process “is taking far too long.”

The White House did not issue a formal “statement of administrative policy” registering its views on the House bill. But administration officials have been wary of changes. “The Department of Energy has already taken steps to modernize the LNG export approval process and ensure applications are looked at efficiently and expeditiously,” said White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz. “We believe the process is working well and that bill is totally unnecessary.”

Similar moves are afoot in the Senate, with the Energy and Natural Resources Committee set to hold a hearing examining a nearly identical bill from Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.

But on Wednesday, the Senate voted 53-45 to reject a much broader proposal that would have put LNG exports to World Trade Organization member nations on the same legal footing as those destined for countries that have free-trade agreements with the United States. Current law requires the Energy Department to grant approval for gas exports to those free-trade partners without modification or delay. Sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the WTO measure was being considered as an amendment to legislation that would authorize the Keystone XL pipeline. Although his proposal won a majority of votes, it fell short of the 60 needed for adoption under a Senate agreement.